The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
In computer science, an object is a location in memory having a value and referenced by an identifier. Since the introduction of object-oriented programming, an object can refer to a particular instance of a class, and can include multiple fields that have their corresponding values. Relational database management systems may track historical changes to data objects to provide additional information to system users. For example, a salesperson who stores sales opportunity information using a database management system may benefit from accessing the history of the sales opportunity information for a prospective customer, such as changes to the sales opportunity amounts and the sales opportunity scheduled sales dates during the last year. On Friday morning September 13th, the salesperson accesses the database management system to determine what were the potential sales amount and the scheduled sales date for all of the salesperson's sales opportunities during the present month.
The prior art user interface for the database management system permits the user to select either fixed dates or relative dates, such as the last day of each week or each day of the month. The weekly report would provide the requested data for the end of the day on Friday September 6th, which is not enough dates for the salesperson, while the daily report would provide the requested data for the end of the day on September 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th, which is too many dates for the salesperson. If the salesperson wants a report with a number of dates between the number of dates provided by the weekly report and the number of dates provided by the daily report, the prior art user interface for the database management system permits the user to select fixed dates, such as identifying each date individually, which in many situations could become a time consuming process that may result in errors and/or user frustration.